By Kim Bell
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
BERKELEY, Mo. — The day the compressor went out on the morgue cooler, workers for the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office scrambled to move more than 20 bodies into a refrigerated trailer designed as a portable morgue for mass disasters.
Furnished five years ago by a Homeland Security grant, the trailer was meant for anything from a plane crash or terrorist attack to an outbreak of a pandemic disease. It had gone unused all these years.
The compressor that broke earlier this month was repaired the next day, but use of this refrigerated trailer may be a sign of things to come. The St. Louis County medical examiner is considering using the trailer to store the overflow of corpses in drug deaths.
Fatal overdoses from heroin, fentanyl and other opioids are surging. If this pace continues, St. Louis County’s medical examiner, Dr. Mary Case, envisions hooking up the refrigerated trailer to her office’s power source and using it as a makeshift morgue on an ongoing basis.
“I think it’s a very real possibility,” she said. “Our storage facilities are strained to the limit.”
The St. Louis County medical examiner’s office is in the single-story, brown brick George Gantner building on Helen Avenue, near Airport Road and Interstate 170. Inside the building, the main cooler is a stainless steel room where carts on wheels line the walls. The morgue has a capacity for 20 bodies, one per cart. A body is X-rayed and autopsied on that cart.
Largely because of a surge in drug overdoses, the morgue typically is crowded, especially on weekends. As new bodies arrive and before autopsies are performed or funeral homes retrieve them for burial, attendants make room by putting two bodies on a cart designed for one. A census sheet of the body count shows 24 days in May when more than 20 bodies were stored there. There were two days when 33 bodies were in the storage facility, and two days with 29.
The St. Louis County medical examiner’s office recorded 181 fatal overdoses last year, nearly double what it had in 2010. Officials expect to surpass that number in 2017. Homicides are also up, although not as sharply. The county had 78 homicides last year, compared with 48 in 2010.
“On some weekends, there are times when we have no capacity for the bodies that we have,” Case said. “If that were on a daily basis, when that happens, we will have to have refrigerated trucks.”
Usually, refrigerated trucks are meant for mass disasters. They were used in Joplin, Mo., when a tornado killed 161 people. New York City shut down an entire street to make room for rows of trucks to store remains of those killed at the World Trade Center. In a heat wave in 1995 that killed hundreds, Chicago brought in refrigerated semitrailers to hold the bodies.
Case, 74, who began her career here in the mid-1970s, is a board-certified forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner for St. Louis County, as well as St. Charles, Franklin and Jefferson counties. She has seen it all, but she says the opioid crisis is surprising.
When Case arrives at work each morning, she enters the morgue and looks at a board listing the new deaths. “Some days, I gasp because there are seven, eight, nine cases,” she said. “It used to be if we had four or five cases, that was an ungodly day. Not anymore.”
The list might say overdose, overdose, suicide, car accident, homicide. “It used to be, every few days there would be a drug overdose. Now almost every day, now maybe half of the deaths are drug overdoses,” she said.
The refrigerated trailer, if it’s parked nearby, would be a way to ease overcrowding without having to add on to the building. Worried that her staff handling bodies might be at risk if powder from the powerful drugs became airborne, Case this month requested that the county train them to use Narcan, an opioid antidote.
Heroin-related overdose deaths in the United States have more than quadrupled since 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Coroners and medical examiners across the country struggle to keep up. Using a refrigerated trailer meant for mass disasters to handle the surge in drug deaths isn’t such a stretch, Case said.
“We have a mass casualty of drug overdoses in this country, only it’s not all at once,” Case said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a report on the U.S. opioid epidemic, said 52,404 people died in the U.S. in 2015 from drug overdose, compared with 47,055 deaths in 2014. The drug overdose death rate increased significantly in the last few years: from 12.3 deaths per 100,000 population in 2010 to 16.3 in 2015, the report says.
Dr. Brian L. Peterson, chief medical examiner in Milwaukee County, Wis., is president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “Virtually every medical examiner’s office and toxicology laboratory in the U.S. has felt the impact of the opioid tsunami,” Peterson said.
The sheer number of drug cases is threatening accreditation of offices across the country, Peterson said. The association has workload standards. An office is considered deficient if a pathologist must perform more than 250 autopsies a year. If the pathologist performs more than 325 autopsies a year, the office would get provisional accreditation at best, he said.
Nationwide, at least four offices already have dropped to provisional accreditation because of the bigger caseload, Peterson said.
“I expect that trend to continue,” he added.
There’s also an extreme shortage of forensic pathologists, Peterson said. There are about 400 working across the country, and 900 are needed.
Filling that void isn’t easy. Peterson said only 30 or 40 people finish their fellowships each year. Not all of them will go into full-time forensic pathology. With low staffing numbers, expected retirements and increased caseloads, “the situation in forensic pathology is truly dire,” Peterson said.
Locally, if the burgeoning case load continues, Case said she might need to hire two additional pathologists. Her staff includes three full-time pathologists and one part-time pathologist. Because of a long-held policy in the office, they run toxicology tests and perform mostly external exams, but not a full autopsy, when evidence points to an obvious drug overdose. “We don’t have the manpower to do it,” Case said.
Some offices across the country have turned to hired guns to work as temporary fill-ins to perform autopsies. They are in high demand. Offices from Kansas to Hawaii are advertising for help. A busy medical examiner’s office in Reno, Nev., offered to pay up to $1,200 a day, plus travel and hotel costs. About 30 counties are advertising for this temporary fill-in physician help, Peterson said.
In Dayton, Ohio, Montgomery County is considering hiring a forensic pathologist from Florida who would fly in for five days and perform four or five autopsies a day on people who died of drug overdoses, said Ken Betz, director of the coroner’s office there.
Betz said his office is on pace to handle 700 to 800 drug overdose cases this year, compared to 371 in all of last year. The population of Montgomery County is about 500,000, or half that of St. Louis County.
“It’s terrible,” Betz said of the climbing drug deaths. “My staff is tired, overworked.” His county converted a garage to additional freezer space 1 1/2 years ago, bought two refrigerated trailers at $46,000 each, and has rented space in funeral homes.
The city of St. Louis has enough storage space. St. Clair County has no issues either, storing its bodies at hospitals. Madison County uses a refrigeration crypt in Wood River that normally has adequate space for 12 bodies but sometimes is crowded by victims of overdose. Stephen P. Nonn, coroner of Madison County, said he might consider adding another refrigerated unit inside the morgue.
In Berkeley, the 16-foot-long refrigerated trailer Case considers using was given to the county about five years ago as part of a Homeland Security grant through St. Louis Area Regional Response System. The trailer cost $35,000 but was stocked with thousands of dollars worth of equipment, such as cameras for identifying bodies, knives and other autopsy gear.
Case said she would use that trailer first, before renting 18-wheeler truck trailers like the ones New York City used after 9/11. Another option, Case said, might be to convert space in the office building for a cooler.
The refrigerated trailer behind her office is identical to trailers from the same grant that are parked in St. Charles, St. Clair and Madison counties. “If God forbid there is a terrorist attack (in the region)... then all trailers would be delivered down there,” said Nick Gragnani, director of the St. Louis Area Regional Response System.
Told the county might use the trailer for the drug overdose surge, Gragnani said: “That’s fine. Do it.” He said he doesn’t want the gear bought for terrorism response to go unused.
Before getting the trailers, the Regional Response System’s mass fatality planning group in 2010 had discussed all sorts of scenarios where the bodies could pile up quickly, such as an earthquake along the New Madrid fault, severe weather events -- and if a mass disaster were to strike a county’s morgue. However, nowhere on that group’s radar was the thought that drug overdoses might surge so much that the trailers would be needed, said Madison County’s deputy coroner Roger Smith, who was co-chair of that panel. “The number of overdose deaths has brought us a dynamic we’ve never seen,” Smith said.
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